One thing I don’t hear, in the news, on occurrence of airlines disasters blamed on a flight-attitude control that is totally jammed – such as the crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261 – is anything about what instructions, as to possible actions with alternate plane-maneuvering, controls might be included in the training of airline pilots.
I approach this subject with near total ignorance of the operation of aircraft of any kind, but if you conclude that you have absolutely no control over elevator / vertical stabilizer adjustments, for instance, and contemplate an immediate steep downward spiral – on the relevant planes, can you not fiddle with ailerons and rudder / horizontal stabilizer adjustments (as available) quickly enough to bank so as to achieve a more gradual spiral, which could have the possibility of a softer landing that might allow more preservation of the lives of those on board?
Pilots get training in recovery from ‘unusual attitudes’, such as spiral dives and stalls. What exactly were you thinking of?
Unless an airplane is in an unrecoverable spin, or stalls at an altitude too low for recovery, a decent pilot can recover the airplane from whatever unusual attitude it may find itself in. Aircraft have been flipped on their backs from turbulence, wound up going straight up or down due to various circumstances. A spiral dive is probably the most dangerous.
But when airplanes hit the ground from cruise flight, it’s usually due to mechanical failure or fuel starvation. Pilots ARE trained to glide aircraft to a safe landing (and a 767 pilot did just that over Gimli Manitoba a few years ago), but big jets have to land on a runway or there are almost certainly going to be casualties.
Pilots, even private pilots like me, receive hours and hours of training to cope with emergencies.
Here are your controls: Elevator (or stabilator) controls pitch. Ailerons control roll. Rudder controls yaw. Throttle(s) control thrust.
You may remember the DC-10 crash in Sioux City (or was it Sioux Falls?). The flight controls were disabled when part of the rear engine cut their hydraulic lines. The crew were able to save most of the people on board by using differential thrust on the two remaining engines. (By the way, the pilot who pulled off that amazing recovery was forced to retire soon after that because he turned 60.)
So if you do lose control effectiveness you can still maneuver if you have an operating engine on each wing. I’ve heard that radio controlled model airplanes used to only have one channel and were able to maneuver with only a rudder.
If you have a “jammed” control surface, there’s probably not a lot you can do. If the deflection isn’t too great you might be able to compensate. For example, if you have a slight deflection of the ailerons you can comensate with opposite rudder. If you have a slight pitch problem you can try to compensate with the throttle(s).
But the greater the deflection of the jammed control surface, the more difficult it is to compensate. At some point it’s just impossible.
As I understood reports, it is believed the pilots made some attempt to gain control over the aircraft, but then at about 17,000 feet, the pilots lost control entering into a nose dive.
Think of a car on skidding ice: The drivers have some ability to pull the car out of a severe skid, but often over-compensate resulting in wild swerves and swings, etc.
Sure, the pilots go through training, but the plane is operating in an unstable state. The pilots are left to fend against the laws of aerodynamics and general physics with one (or more) hands tied behind their backs. (This is rather the simplistic answer.)
Oh yeah. The next time I’m in a plane that hits some wind sheer, I want my pilot and co-pilot to save their asses while leaving all the passengers to die.
–It was recently discovered that research causes cancer in rats.
I believe all major airlines (not sure about Alaskan in particular) require pilots to do simulator time each year. On those big, cool looking sims mounted on hydraulics that act like those VR rides in amusement parks that move around to simulate banking and turbulence and stuff.
Anyways, part of the training is on in-flight emergencies, such as a simulated depressurized cabin (so the pilots have to ‘fly’ with oxygen masks), severe wind shear on approach, loss of instruments, etc. IIRC, there was an article on this training in Flying magazine a few years ago.
Ejecting at high speed has been done. You might get beaten up a bit, but it’s better than impacting the ground at 700 knots.
General Aviation aircraft (Cessnas, Pipers, Maules, Beechcraft, etc.) are almost never flown with a parachute. They rarely break up in flight and it’s usually relatively safe to “ride it down” (maintaining control, of course). Most light-plane crashes are not fatal.
Some aircraft such as the Cirrus (a new company building aircraft from composites instead of aluminum) and many ultralights have ballistic parachutes attached to the airframe. If the aircraft becomes unflyable the pilot may deploy the parachute and bring down the whole aircraft. This would most likely destroy the ship, but the occupants should emerge virtually unscathed.
Pilots have ejected at supersonic speeds and lived. High-speed ejection seats have been designed that pull a stiff shroud done in front of the pilot to prevent wind-blast injury.
But commercial airliners don’t go 700 mph anyway. They typically cruise at indicated airspeeds of 250-400 mph (true airspeeds can be as high mach .9, but your body would feel forces proportional to the indicated airspeed, because jets only go real fast at high altitude where the air is thin and the force of it would be less).
Pilots indeed are trained to deal with mutiple failures and problems (engine(s) out, fire, instrument failure simultaneously) in simulators that mimic in incredible detail what a real plane would do. Problems arise when a preponderance of failures combine to make a recovery unlikely the first time they combine. To wit: windshear. Initially pilots encountered it and did the best they could with the sudden drastic changes in wind speed and direction. Some made it and some did not. Advanced training in dealing with this anomaly (throttles full forward and max climb) gave rise to situations that allowed pilots to overcome a previously deadly scenario.
BTW, the full motion sims at the UAL training center in Denver are truly amazing. They have an open house every year and I’ve always bought some time to fly them ($ to United Way ). Last October the instructor had us barrel roll a 737. While the simulator didn’t actually turn 180 degrees the combination of visual input and physical motion was absolutely convincing. Better than drugs!
I think that a lot of people don’t understand aircraft. I think that a lot of people believe that airplanes will fall out of the sky at the slightest provocation.
One way to understand them is to go up in a small plane. You can see what’s going on instead of sitting in the back of a bus.
Most FBOs (“Fixed-Base Operators” – a flight school, if you will) will be glad to take people up for a half hour or so to show the basics of airplane (or helicopter) operations.
Go for it! It’s fun to fly! And it will make you less nervous the next time you ride a jet.
they seem to prefer landing in the ocean if they can, instead of on crowded cities. Exept for in SD, Calif once, when they plowed thru a residential area.